robert00700

I wonder if one could construct a metric for how 'interesting' a drawing is- then throw it at a genetic algorithm? I'm guessing most likely the system is inherently unstable, so two 'interesting' parents don't necessarily create 'interesting' offspring

Would be great to see some articles on their technical approach, I assume they have used techniques to reach those scales based upon the fact the average pair of players are too far away from each other to be visible

Maybe it's my experience of living in central London but I can certainly think of many 'demographics' that would be interested in soundproof bedrooms on the street...

Nice to see PCA in an HN article, it's a very powerful tool.

For those struggling to get the example in this article, I find PCA easier to understand given visual examples, and in less dimensions (try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GaussianScatterPCA.png)

Note how this dataset is two dimensional in nature, and PCA yields two vectors. The first gives the direction of the greatest variation, and the next gives the variation orthogonally to the first.

An awesome use of PCA is for facial detection, a method called 'Eigenfaces' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface

I think it depends on the genre at hand. Massive AAA singleplayer titles that tend towards being more ‘interactive cinematic experiences’ would suffer from this certainly, but I’m sure (as other have posted) more free-form games such as Minecraft it can only be a boon for. With the former, a play-through potentially makes your own experience feel a bit stale, whereas with creative games it more likely than not just stimulates your own imagination about how the possibilities of the sandbox the game gives.

Surely censoring the functionality is completely impossible, due to the dynamic nature of JS?

alert("blah")

can just as easily be made to be

window["alert"]("blah"), where the string 'alert' could be made by a very convoluted manner. Solving this would be akin to solving the halting problem, no?

Static typing is nice, but does this support type inference?

Some keyboard shortcuts would be fantastic (Especially delete!)

I would think the average person isn't lucky enough have an inventory of multiple thousand dollars of high-end computing equipment. This kind of system would be perfect in developing countries, or as the project suggests, for education.

At first I was wondering about the benefits of using such a system vs. something like deploying the raspberry pi en masse (which is a full system for under $50), but after some thought it comes down to the fact that the average utilization of any computer most of the time is very low, but we really notice the CPU power when we do something intensive (although not very often). Each user on this system could potentially feel the same power as a full desktop, as the probability of multiple users requiring intensive computation at the same time is relatively low. Kind of like how web providers quote 10MB per customer, but their infrastructure only has to cater for a tiny fraction of the potential full utilization.

Great project, although it might have been a good idea for them to check out using the Microsoft Kinect and Point Cloud Library (It's like OpenCV for depth cameras! http://pointclouds.org/). With the 3D data you could account for the trajectory of the missiles, for example.

>I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/The_Corn_Field I recall bad avatars back in Second Life were once sent to a virtual corn field for a few weeks to reflect on their actions!

This is definitely true, the tech Bloomberg uses was novel in the 80s, but the functionality of a modern browser now outstrips that of the terminal program. There's actually some functions in the Bloomberg Terminal these days which just fire up an embedded browser to render the content!

As far as I'm aware anecdotally (I interned at Bloomberg last summer) Mike was in a position that required managing technology in his previous financial job before starting Bloomberg itself. Perhaps a more useful skill than being a developer himself considering he had a few million of capital to hire his own team from the off!

It's Mono running on top of Unity's own graphics/control/audio abstraction

I'd definitely recommend Unity3D for this. It provides (as far as it can) platform-agnostic abstractions for controls, graphics and audio, although if you want to get down-and-dirty with a particular platform you can easily write native plug-ins.

Very technical people often have reservations over such systems that seem to cater for non-techie developers, but I found it made game development much more enjoyable- less platform-specific graphics boilerplate and more enjoyable challenges like AI.

I ended up creating this simple ragdoll game over a few days for iOS- http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ragdoll-spike!/id384354298?mt... , I'd be interested to see how much longer it would have taken to do natively!

Unity 3.5 now has flash export, so I think even Linux is now supported?

Good luck! I produced an iPhone game in 5 days, but I was using the Unity3D engine which really allows for abstraction from the nitty-gritty low-level iOS programming. I definitely recommend it for rapid development.

Around $350/month

$100-$200 a month selling virtual weapons in SecondLife (Used to be around $800 a month a few years ago)

$200 a month with my two iOS apps developed using Unity3D. Each took around 1 week to make! Seriously was worth the $300 license, I doubt anybody could match the development speed natively.

Liverpool!